Thomas Merton quotes

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I would call the attention of the reader to the difference between "reason" and "reasoning." Reason is a light, reasoning a proces...s. Reason is a faculty, reasoning an exercise of that faculty. Reasoning proceeds from one truth to another by means of argumentation. This generally involves the whole mind in labor and complexity. But reason does not exist merely in order to engage in reasoning. The process is a means to an end. The true fulfillment of reason as a faculty is found when it can embrace the truth simply and without labor in the light of single intuition.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

One might compare the journey of the soul to mystical union, by way of pure faith, to the journey of a car on a dark highway. The ...only way the driver can keep to the road is by using his headlights. So in the mystical life, reason has its function. The way of faith is necessarily obscure. We drive by night. Nevertheless our reason penetrates the darkness enough to show us a little of the road ahead. It is by the light of reason that we interpret the signposts and make out the landmarks along our way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics. The former is supple and lifelike, it follows our experience. The latter ...is abstract and rigid, more ideal. The latter is perfectly necessary, perfectly reliable: the former is only sometimes reliable and hardly ever systematic. But the logic of mathematics achieves necessity at the expense of living truth, it is less real than the other, although more certain. It achieves certainty by a flight from the concrete into abstraction. Doubtless, to an idealist, this would seem to be a more perfect reality. I am not an idealist. The logic of the poet--that is, the logic of language or the experience itself--develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Lanza del Vasto noted a deep connection between play and war, even before the games theory and nuclear war strategy became practic...ally identified. In our society, everything, in fact, is a game. But if everything is a game, then everything leads to war. Play is aimless and yet multiplies obstacles so that the "aim," which in fact does not exist, cannot be attained by the opponent. For instance, getting a ball in a hole. War is caused by similar aimless aims. Not by hunger, not by real need. War is a game of the powerful, or of whole collectivities devoted to self-assertion. It is "the great public vice that consists in playing with the lives of men." War plays with life and death, and does so magnificently. Everybody becomes involved. Everybody has to live or die--so that other side may not get a ball in a hole.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and ap...plause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacti...ng to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I am ... willing to admit that some people might live there for years, or even a lifetime, so protected that they never sense the ...sweet stench of corruption that is all around them--the keen, thin scent of decay that pervades everything and accuses with a terrible accusation the superficial youthfulness, the abounding undergraduate noise, that fills those ancient buildings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The monk in hiding himself from the world becomes not less than himself, not less of a person, but more of a person, more truly an...d perfectly himself: for his personality and individuality are perfected in their true order, the spiritual, interior order, of union with God, the principle of all perfection.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »